Meet MeeGo Harmattan -Nokia N9

The smartphone market is crowded (or, 'healthy', you could say); we have iOS and Android in the top spots, and a range of competitors like Windows Phone 7, Symbian, BlackBerry 7, webOS, Bada, etc. iOS, Android, WP7 are on the ascendency, most other things are static or in decline.


What you often find though, is that you can tell the good ones apart by how consistent and pleasant to use they are. Pick up a webOS device, for example, and you instantly see a pretty OS with many great UI concepts. Use it for a little longer, and you start to see how shallow that veneer actually is - user experience nightmares, terrible performance, half-finished designs, etc. The sliding three-pane UI in webOS 3.x is a great example of this; drag the divider and the panes will judder across the screen, the main pane not resizing anything until you let go, at which point it snaps to the new position with no animation or feeling. Compare with the Twitter for iPad UI and how fluid it feels, and you would be appalled. It's such a pity, because webOS is a great concept and implementation - it just doesn't have the final 10% to make it feel like you're using something more than a pretty-looking webpage. I believe it's here to stay, however, unlike Symbian, BlackBerry OS, etc.

iOS is the king, so far, with consistency of user experience. You'd have to make a conscious choice as a developer to create an app that breaks the inherent UX niceties and animation in the OS. I like to call this the 'soul' of the platform. Android, on the flipside, is a hodgepodge of inconsistent UX, where even Google's own apps decide to feature new styles and concepts in between OS releases (the App Marketplace, for example, has been redesigned twice in recent history, with neither style matching the rest of the OS). Windows Phone 7 also has a quality UX, until you reach the third party apps, where everything degenerates (the third-party apps, being Silverlight, have no relation to the native software that comes on the phone, which is all C++ and using the same frameworks).

Recently, Nokia announced the N9, the first (and perhaps last) of their MeeGo smartphones. Where does MeeGo fit?

N9
Long awaited, the expectations were really high for this device - MeeGo was originally supposed to be the savior of Nokia, their modern smartphone OS to replace the aging Symbian. When Nokia announced in February that they were instead going to move to Windows Phone 7 as their primary platform, most took it as a sign that MeeGo was simply never going to be ready, or competitive. The open-source version of MeeGo for handsets is so barebones that it would take another year at the least to build a compelling user experience on top of it, so it was understandable that Nokia would focus their efforts on WP7 instead.

Nokia N9 strategic significance

Concerned about the smartphone market trends for the researchers, NOKIA N9machine equipped with the software so that they are still confused! NOKIA officialinformation released by public relations NOKIA N9 equipped MeeGo 1.2 operating system, but the fact is most of the NOKIA N9 still uses Maemo 6 system's core code,so essentially still be a Maemo phones. However, due to mixed operating systemwhich is fully compatible MeeGo 2.1 version of the proprietary API interface, so end-users and third-party software developers will not feel significantly different. Confused about the outside world's second point is NOKIA N9 with the same name last yearexposed a prototype NOKIA association between? Past exposure, also known as theNOKIA N9 prototype has a sliding keyboard, was outside the first quarter of 2011 is expected to come out. It is alleged that the design house R & D department is calledNOKIA NOKIA N9-00 aircraft after the termination of research and development,follow-up, code-named NOKIA N9-01's models become formally published NOKIANOKIA N9 model basis.

 

▲ past exposure, also known as the NOKIA N9 prototype has a sliding keyboard, wasoutside the first quarter of 2011 is expected to come out. It is alleged that the designhouse R & D department is called NOKIA NOKIA N9-00 aircraft after the termination ofresearch and development.

NOKIA identified as Windows Phone coming to fully join the camp, in the leanconversion period model introduced a NOKIA N9 What is the purpose? Somespeculated that it was NOKIA fulfill its promise of long-term focus on softwaredevelopment industry MeeGo and investors have an account. There is also speculationNOKIA NOKIA N9 will not be the first, it may be the only MeeGo smartphone? NOKIAbold decision to perhaps difficult to understand ordinary people, but long-term development, whether NOKIA N9 is a follow-up models? NOKIA products can beobtained from this valuable experience with this particular operating system MeeGoattempts to diversify routes, test the market and look for more opportunities. MeeGopast R & D team put a lot of effort, their results should be made ​​public. Over the past year will be disappointed in the media point to "breathing" of the Symbian OS, MeeGocan temporarily transfer the advent of focus for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 products warm body. Development of a multi-platform and a system, still in control as long as the cost within the NOKIA R & D departments can be used as a combattraining, to try and do no harm, let alone if the NOKIA N9 phone sales exceed expectations , NOKIA can also prove to the entire mobile phone industry is still capable of developing hardware and software combination of smart mobile phones. 

 

▲ MeeGo can temporarily transfer the advent of focus for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 products warm body. Development of a multi-platform and a system, still incontrol as long as the cost within the NOKIA R & D departments can be used as acombat training

 

Nokia N9 might not appear in the UK?

A report has surfaced over at the Inquirer which theorises that Nokia might not release its N9 smartphone in the UK.

The N9 is the MeeGo powered affair, and the Inquirer reckons that in this country Nokia might just skip straight to its Windows Phone 7 models, the next major platform for its smartphones.

The reasoning (follow it in the article here) is that the UK doesn’t feature on the official N9 page when it comes to the list of countries the handset will be released in.

A drop-down menu allows you to check for availability, and the UK isn’t listed here, along with a number of other European countries such as France and Germany.

Hence the conclusion that Nokia may just move straight to WP7 territory come the autumn, particularly seeing as the leaked Sea Ray phone looks very much like an N9 (but with Windows Phone 7 on board, and an extra button) anyway.

However, that conclusion may well have been jumped to, because one factor the Inquirer seems to have overlooked is that the Nokia online store has just closed down in the UK (and other countries across Europe).

Therefore, the availability is likely to refer to direct availability from the Nokia store, rather than the MeeGo N9 not being released at all in the UK.

Other UK retailers, for example Play.com, are offering the N9 – although it isn’t on pre-order yet, there are product pages up for the device.

None of which is a guarantee, of course, but it would seem unlikely Nokia would want to skip over chunks of the European market with a phone which has piqued the interest of many (if only to see MeeGo in action before WP7 strolls into town).

How do you think? That under your view, thank you